There is a need for a material, known as a ply, fabric, or the like in the composites industry, but may also be known generally as a fabric in the textile industry, to be dispensed in a precise and automatic fashion to a known location, and then cut or severed, and then have the process automatically repeated for another location. If a belt process or other moving process is moving a second material say under the aforementioned process, these highest-diameter-severed material sections could be deposited precisely on top of the aforementioned moving second material. Or there could be other reasons for this dispensing system.
The reasons could be many. Perhaps rolls of material (fabric, composite plies, carbon fiber fabric, aramid fabric, glass fabric, thermoplastic fabric, some with a resin matrix and some without, or material fabric, nylon, synthetic, or cotton fabric, and the like) already having been formed into a roll, (as has been done for decades in the textile, composites, and fabric production industries using many techniques such as weaving, knitting, stitching, with textile machinery, looms, and the like) are needed to become the essential material in a secondary process. By this it is meant that a roll of material of any type, as generally described in this paragraph, may exist, but, this roll of material, along with perhaps others, requires further processing before a product exists. In other words, the rolls of material are essentially a raw material for an end-product manufacturer. Or the new product may be just another enhanced multi-layer fabric, on a new roll, and available for further processing. That is, the roll itself could be a product, but it also could be processed, along with other rolls, to form future products or rolls of material.
For example, a composite product may need to be processed by dispensing material/fabric from a roll, cutting it, and placing it in a mold. This is usually accomplished by hand with human labor. A composite mold, or hand lay-up, or other composite processing techniques such as Scrimp and Vartm, may all require dispensing of a fabric by hand from a roll of material to a mold, or it is cut, then dispensed by hand to a mold. The present invention could assist with the dispensing of this material to a mold, automatically and with no human intervention.
Or, in the composites industry, for example, fabric can be made in a roll and in its most basic form is known as uni-directional fabric. Multiple rovings or bundles of fibers, of carbon, or aramid, or glass, or PE thermoplastic, or the like, can be placed side-by-side and pulled through a process to stitch together the fibers, or could be combined together with a thermoplastic material. These processing techniques are well-known and in the public domain. The direction of this uni-directional fabric is referred herein as the 0-degree direction and is also known as the warp direction in the textile industry. This 0-degree material is processed and most commonly stored on a roll, thus creating a roll of material known as uni-directional fabric or tape or 0-degree fabric. The composites industry knows that a uni-directional tape or fabric has limited value. Therefore, there is a need, due to requirements for improved physical properties of a composite, to produce a tape or fabric that has reinforcing fibers oriented in the 0-degree direction, and also the orthogonal or 90-degree direction. Additional property values are achieved by adding +/−45-degrees direction. In the past, fabric is either stitched (90-degree to 0-degree) or it is woven (0-degree (warp) interwoven with 90-degree (weft)) or it is cut by hand and placed over other fabric material at any orientation.
Now a new generation of fabrics has arrived wherein the 0-degree fabric (say glass fiber and then plastic) can be formed in a roll or tape by heating, consolidating the two materials. Forming a 0-degree material with a 90-degree material, with the latter being placed on the surface of the former, requires a human being to cut material from a roll, and then place it at 90-degree orientation onto the 0-degree roll and then reheat and consolidate. The end result is a 0-degree plus 90-degree fabric, which is of high need, and can be placed on a roll; however, this is currently accomplished non-automatically. Therefore there is a need as described herein to place a 90-degree ply over a moving 0-degree/90-degree ply fabric.